Fiction/Nonfiction.

Gay Men, Urban And Rural

From The City And The Country, Tales Of Coming To Terms With One's Homosexuality

November 24, 1996|By Charles Wasserburg. Charles Wasserburg's poems, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. He teaches in the English department at Northwestern University.

The Golden Age of Promiscuity

By Brad Gooch

Knopf, 320 pages, $24

Farm Boys:

Lives of Gay Men From the Rural Midwest

By Will Fellows

University of Wisconsin Press, 316 pages, $27.50

In the annals of AIDS he is known as "Patient Zero," a handsome, blond flight attendant--possibly French--who arrives in New York City during summer 1979. In the closing pages of Brad Gooch's novel "The Golden Age of Promiscuity," he appears in a gay club called The Anvil, where he innocuously meets the novel's protagonist, 26-year-old Sean Devlin. As Wagner's Ring Cycle blasts through the club's speaker system, his presence brings with it a whiff of the Goetterdaemmerung that will stifle the riotous gay sexuality of the '70s, the true subject of Gooch's novel.

"The Golden Age of Promiscuity" traces Sean's career as he comes of age along with Manhattan's burgeoning gay culture. It depicts the legendary haunts of CBGB's, the Mineshaft and the Chelsea Hotel as Sean drops out of Columbia University to spend time in Greenwich Village and pursue his ultimately successful dream of being a famous underground filmmaker--a paradox if there ever was one. Once ensconced in the Village, Sean falls in with a parade of performance artists, filmmakers and hustlers all set on exploring the limits of sexual gratification.

With chapters titled after real places that now have an almost mythical significance in New York's gay culture ("The Firehouse, GAA, and ZAPS" and "The Mineshaft") and its obsessive name-dropping, the book at times yields to gossipy memoir. Knowing asides dot the narrative, throwing the novelist's fictional world out of kilter: "A couple years later the word `punk' would be used, certainly for the Ramones, if not for the Talking Heads or Television. . . ."

In its resuscitation of the lost world of S&M clubs, bathhouses and endless parties, "The Golden Age of Promiscuity" treads the ground of the historical novel. Bianca Jagger, David Bowie and Jesse Norman all receive cameos, along with famous and not-so-famous writers whose significance seems only that they attend the same parties and nightclubs as Sean. At one point, the importance of an interesting historical tidbit about old New York (29th Street once was lined with belly-dancing clubs) becomes clear only when we discover its source: the composer Virgil Thomson, with whom Sean had once dined "at Virgil's favorite French restaurant."

Gooch's novel falls more properly into the long line of coming-of-age stories from Huckleberry Finn through Edmund White's classic "A Boy's Own Story" that tell of prescient innocents coming to terms with the adult world of mortality, hypocrisy and power. But while "The Golden Age of Promiscuity" contains a great deal of penetration, little of it is psychological. Sean's friends and sexual partners drift in and out of the novel's pages in a libidinous limbo. Passive, detached and often heavily drugged, Sean becomes too opaque a lens through which to view this life. His efforts at evaluating his own experiences--including his predilection for taking on the masochistic role in sex--issue only in the occasional stilted remark. "The two wires of love are crossed in me," he quips after a potentially dangerous flirtation. "It was his smile. I was once told by an astrologer that my Venus is in Mars." Most curiously, following a truly horrific encounter with a sadist who nearly suffocates Sean and then dumps his drugged body in a snowy park, the novel carries on as if nothing has happened. "After Sean's near-death experience," the narrator shrugs, "he lightened up." Only when he meets his true love, Willy, a preppy Jewish boy, does Sean begin to show vulnerability and dimension. And there, alas, the novel ends.

By comparison, the simple, often self-effacing testimonies of rural gay men in Will Fellows' "Farm Boys" prove moving and richly three-dimensional. These coming-of-age stories from men ranging from 24 to 84 smash the stereotype that gay culture is exclusively an urban culture. Fellows has culled stories from more than 100 responses to announcements about his book project in several Midwestern gay presses. The degree to which their tellers are comfortable even today with their sexuality is made apparent by the fact that roughly one-third use pseudonyms.